The Christmas Wish (29 page)

“May I help you?” Nick asked.

“I can do it myself.” Noel jerked the padlock closer to her body. Her hand twisted around like a pretzel in an attempt to get the key into the lock.

“I’m certain that given time and adequate lighting you could do this, but what I’m offering is my help.”

She let out a long sigh and her breath smelled of cinnamon. He looked into her eyes. Those damnable green eyes. He fought the urge to reach out and wrap his hands into those red curls and pull her close to him and capture her lips with his. Damn, but the power of his physical attraction to her was still strong, even while anger burned in his heart.

She’d left him. She’d abandoned him. She’d destroyed all that he’d thought his future would be. And for what? To go to Africa and lead a goat and plant a tree?

“Noel, please.”

He would not soften to her. He would play her. He would get what he wanted, these people out of Winter Pines and the damned building demo’d before Christmas. She handed him the key to the lock and he pulled it forward. He stepped even closer. Her breath caressed him. The pulse in her neck beat fast, her heart rate like a hummingbird’s.

His cock grew hard beneath his pants. He inserted the key in the padlock, and all he could think of was putting his cock inside her body. The warmth of her. Noel’s lush legs wrapping around his waist and pulling him forward. That hot and passionate heart that beat for every lost soul beating for him again, as it once had. Her hands in his hair, his name on her lips. He turned the key and the lock fell open.

“Done,” Nick said. His gaze met hers and heat fired between them. Molten and real and undeniable.

She held out her mittened hand and he dropped the keys into it. She unwrapped the first giant chain and he lifted it from her. She stepped from beside the door.

Crunch.

“No,” Noel said and shook her head. “No, that can’t happen. How, after this day?” Her gaze dropped to her feet. Beneath her toe was a pair of glasses. Nick bent down and picked up the mangled frames.

“Yours?”

Noel nodded.

“Still blind without them?” Nick asked.

“Yes.”

“Extra pair?”

“Of course not,” Noel said. She held out her hand.

“May I?” Nick asked.

Her tongue darted out over her lips. She didn’t want to say yes, he could feel that in his bones, she didn’t want to take anything from him aside from a piece of property for which he’d already paid. Noel could harden her heart to progress, to capitalism, to money, but she had never been able to harden her heart to compassion, to helpfulness, to genuine kindness.

“Yes,” Noel whispered.

“Frederick?” Nick called. Frederick stood to the side, speaking with the foreman of the crew he’d just released for the next two days.

“Sir?”

“Would you have these fixed?”

“Immediately, sir.”

Frederick walked toward the car. Nick turned back to Noel. Still as beautiful. Still as stunning. Still as sexy. But still absolutely the biggest pain in his ass that he’d ever met.

*

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Book one of the Powder Springs Series

Chapter 1

Savannah McGrath pushed open the Jeep door and the shriek of old metal tore through the frigid mountain air. A gray pall hung heavy in the sky—no sun—no blue—not even the scent of snow. Her legs trembled and sent a shiver up her spine. The shiver shifted and hardened in her belly into a thick, sick feeling. Her hand tightened around the butt of the Winchester 1897 and her thumb caressed the initials that had been carved into the heavy wood stock nearly a century before by a dime-store pocket knife.

Grandma Margaret always said the only difference between a possum and a man was that the possum hissed before you shot it. Savannah’d seen a possum hiss—this morning she intended to find out about the man.

Savannah’s breath, like puffs of smoke, drifted into the early morning sky. She trudged across the Hopkinses’ front yard—a foul-looking patch of dirt and rock—past a rusted snowmobile missing both skis that waited on cinder blocks for a rescue that would never arrive. She climbed the porch steps. Rickety and rotted, the wood creaked beneath her. On the porch crumpled beer cans lay scattered beside a ripped green leather sofa. The Hopkinses didn’t take much interest in caring for things, including their family.

Anger surged in Savannah. Anger fueled by seventeen years of neglect. Anger fueled by her daughter. Anger fueled by Bobby Hopkins. An anger that rushed through her head and caused a pounding within her brain nearly as loud as her fist pounding on Bobby’s front door.

“Bobby, you get your no-good ass out here!”

A shadow flickered on the other side of the picture window, but no face emerged.

“I know you’re in there!” Savannah yelled. “I’m not leaving until we settle this. You hear me, Bobby?”

She pressed her nose against the cool glass of the picture window. Silent images flickered across the unwatched TV in the darkened living room. Her heart hung heavy in her chest with the emptiness of the room, with the squalor of the house, with the absence of Bobby and his continued cowardice toward their daughter.

Savannah turned away from the window, her grim feelings like gravity on the corners of her mouth. She stomped down the steps. Her gaze locked on the window just above the garage and she backed into the front yard. Seventeen years before, Savannah had thought she discovered the cure to all that ailed her within that bedroom—a lover, a friend, a partner for her life—but what Savannah had really found was a whole lot of sex and very little contraception.

“She’s mine, Bobby!” Savannah called out into the early morning air. “Do you understand? I raised her! You ran your ass off to Alaska and I raised her!” Her cheeks were too cold to feel her tears. On her tongue the salt tasted bitter. “Damn you, Bobby Hopkins.”

Her heart broke wide and pain thrashed out at her ribs and squeezed at her lungs—so tight and so hard that air burst from her lips and she struggled to draw in a breath. The pain wasn’t for her, the pain wasn’t for Bobby, the pain wasn’t even for Savannah’s long-lost, once-upon-a-time young love—the pain—this pain—that crippled her and stole the breath from her body was for her nearly grown daughter, Ash.

Shame. Embarrassment. Sadness. She and Bobby conveyed those tokens upon their only child much like Savannah’s mother had bequeathed to her. Savannah’s mouth clenched closed with a force that might shred enamel from her molars.

Dammit, Bobby would speak to her. Savannah raised the butt of the gun to her shoulder and sighted on the bedroom window. Her finger settled against the cold metal of the trigger. She wouldn’t let Bobby cower and hide like a cur. He would answer for what he’d done to her, to them, to Ash. He’d answer for what he did in the past and what he was trying to do now. She wouldn’t kill him, but she’d flush out the son of a bitch.

Savannah raised the shotgun’s barrel and aimed just over the roof. She squeezed tight on the trigger and the gun butt slammed into her shoulder. A shaker shingle exploded off the roof.

After the blast of two more shotgun shells and the eruption of two more shingles from the Hopkinses’ roof, a black-and-white SUV rolled to a near-silent stop. No flashers. No siren. Quiet and still, just like that cold Rocky-Mountain morning before Savannah’s shotgun blast.

Self-possessed and without fear, Sheriff Jennings slowly stepped from his SUV. “Morning, Savannah.”

“Wayne,” Savannah said. She didn’t turn. She didn’t lay down her gun. Instead, she pressed the butt to her shoulder and considered whether she wanted to squeeze off another shot.

“I’m gonna have to ask you to lay down that gun.”

Savannah closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Adrenaline pounded through her body. Her heart hammered within her chest to the righteous beat of a lover scorned. She pointed the gun toward the ground.

“No problem, Wayne.” Savannah leaned forward and laid the gun on the ground as if settling a baby into a bassinette. When she stood she raised both hands in the air. Not because Wayne told her to, but because she figured that’s what you did when you got arrested.

“Thank you, Savannah,” Wayne said. “Now I need you to back away from the gun.”

Savannah stepped back—away from Grandma Margaret’s gun, away from the Hopkinses’ house, away from her anger.

“I hate to ask you to do this Savannah, seeing as you’re wearing nice pants and all, but you’ve gotta kneel on the ground and put your hands behind your head.”

With her hands raised, Savannah half turned toward Wayne. “Really?” Savannah asked. Her limp shoulders slumped forward; the McGrath fight drained out of her. Her rage deflated like a pinpricked balloon. “Can’t you just come on over here and cuff me?

“It’s procedure,” Wayne said.

Savannah knelt onto the ground. The cold wet mud pressed through the material to her knees. With the click of closing handcuffs and the weight of cold steel on her wrists, shame lodged in her heart. Savannah’s bottom lip quivered—what had she just done?

Her head hung low as Wayne led her to his SUV. She couldn’t meet the gaze of the looky-loos now gathered across the street in Linda Landry’s front yard. Her mass of brown curls fell about her cheeks, but she couldn’t hide—Ash couldn’t hide. Growing up, Savannah and her sister had endured taunts about their mama’s bad behavior, and now Savannah had inflicted a similar humiliation onto Ash.

“Damn it,” Savannah muttered.

“What’s that?” Wayne settled behind the wheel and met Savannah’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

“Just the hell to pay Ash will have.” Savannah looked across the street at the women wearing nightgowns and whispering behind cupped hands.

“Kids can be cruel,” Wayne said.

Both Wayne and Savannah knew from experience just how cruel the kids of Powder Springs, Colorado, could be to each other.

Savannah fought the humiliation that settled in her chest and the tears that brewed in her eyes. “Wonder what Grandma Margaret thinks today?” As if she might erase the last ten minutes, Savannah closed tight her eyes and shook her head. “Me standing on Bobby Hopkins’s front lawn, shooting at the sky?”

“She probably thinks you’re one strong McGrath woman standing up for your own.”

Savannah pressed her lips into a hard line and fought back the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks. At least Wayne didn’t think she was half-cracked, even if she was sitting in the back of his police cruiser with her hands in cuffs.

Savannah’s sister wouldn’t share Wayne’s sentiment. Tulsa would tell Savannah how dramatic she was, how bad Savannah’s behavior was for Ash, how Savannah had jeopardized custody of Ash to release her own anger.

That was once Savannah told Tulsa Ash’s custody was even in jeopardy.

“Tulsa coming back from LA?” Wayne asked.

Savannah locked eyes with Wayne in the rearview mirror. “She is now.”

*

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THE CHRISTMAS WISH

A Powder Springs Novel

Maggie Marr

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved.

978-1-62051-135-0

AGENCY INFORMATION

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